An excerpt from something else I'm working on tonight:

I took over as manager of my first gas station on a cold weekend in February 1993. The previous weekend, the station had been robbed, and on Sunday evening my boss requested that I go and sit with Jay, who was working at the time of the robbery. Jay was grateful for the company. We served the occasional customer, and listened to the Sunday Night Sex Show on the radio. Len, a man who had once sold me a van, came in and wanted to talk to Jay about the robbery, but Jay didn't have much to say about it. At about 10:45, while we were counting the cigarettes, someone wearing a black hooded sweatshirt burst into the store and poked a gun under the glass partition. I thought, for one wild minute, that it was Len, trying to be funny. Then it hit, it was real. The person with the gun was demanding that we open the door. While Jay opened the side door to let them in, I ran out the back door, planning, somewhat fuzzily, to head for a payphone at the strip mall behind the station. Someone grabbed me and dragged me back inside. Since I had disrupted the script by trying to leave, they felt it necessary to make me lie down on the floor in the back, and the one with the gun held it to my head.

The little group, probably four in all, cleaned out all the cigarettes and money, and left. Jay fell to bits, pacing up and down, repeating, �Not again. I don�t believe it happened again.� My own relief at still being alive made it possible to deal with the police and to call the owner and tell him. Later, on my way home, my calm broke, and waves of adrenaline kept cresting and breaking over me, and I put Pink Floyd in the tape deck and turned Comfortably Numb up really loudly. It was a ritual I was to repeat numerous times over the next month or so. It reminded me that I was alive, and that they couldn�t do anything further to me.

I'm procrastinating. Control Balance theory and Coercion theory: how they explain burglary. (my original, laziness theory still stands: don't want to work, ergo will steal your tv and sell it. beats working at MacDonalds.)

What Kind of Drunk Are You?

well, not really. but it was fun anyway.

The doctor says: it's your ears. If things are spinning, it's related to otoliths. He was talking about it being like a snowglobe, and the otoliths like the snow, and that mine are floating too much, if I understood correctly. He gave me a set of exercises to do to try and shake them back down where they belong and he wants to see me in a month...

Yesterday in Vancouver, after my class, there were extremely high winds. 100 mph, apparently. Skytrains were going slow, but I managed to get a bus (full of German schoolchildren) out to Horseshoe Bay to the ferry terminal just before the 7oclock ferry. Sitting upstairs in the departure area, and suddenly they announce that there will be no more ferries to Nanaimo.

After an abortive attempt to get my money back, since I had somehow lost my ticket, I headed off to the one motel in town. There were a number of people in the lobby, including one that I recognized as being attached to the German school party.

He got up to the counter, about 5 would-be motel-stayers ahead of me, and tried to persuade the proprietor to give them all the rooms that were left, for 28 kids. Without changing expression in the slightest, the proprietor told him there was only one room left. Although this man desperately wanted to make his problem the motel-owner's problem, Mr. German Schoolteacher ended up leaving with a brochure for the Holiday Inn in West Vancouver. The motel man then gave out five or six more keys to all the rest of us waiting. I don't know if I've ever been so happy to know that someone was telling lies......

The room was very clean, and the water was hot. I had a bed, and in the morning the winds had died down and I took the 6:30 am ferry. I even made it to work on time. If the school party had managed to book the whole motel, I would have been forced to go back into Vancouver, and I wouldn't have made the 6:30 ferry...

Kirsten is dealing very nicely with a current situation, but it's driving me nuts... She has two little girlfriends, Caitlin and Brooke, who have started tormenting her in subtle and not-so subtle ways. A few weeks ago she approached me with the idea of having a Halloween party at the house. I said ok, and she went off to start planning it with her friends. They soon fought over the preparations, and to make a long story short, cancelled the party as far as Kirsten knew. Then, suddenly, it was back on, at Brooke's house, but they were refusing to let Kirsten take part, and on Thursday at school invitations were ostentatiously handed out to most of the class except for Kirsten. Yesterday the party happened. Next door but one. Kirsten was resigned, and fished out Mad Gab and made us all play it. This morning, the phone rang, and it was the girls who had stayed overnight at the party, making prank phone calls to upset Kirsten.

Ok, so don't invite her to the party. But then don't call and taunt her, that's just cruel.

Kirsten, predictably, doesn't want me to talk to parents or teachers. I'm respecting her wishes. These girls are going to grow up to be the office bitches somewhere, I'm sure....